They realized that “Goodbye” was not the message they wanted to leave with customers, and asked me where I had seen it, what I was doing, etc… and they started working on a change.

A week or so ago, a Product Specialist from OCLC told me this via email:

“…some progress has been made with respect to the messaging when a user submits a request for interlibrary loan from WorldCat.org. As you know, the previous message of “goodbye” is truly not the message we want to give our users. While investigating this issue we discovered that making a big change is truly a big development effort. While we will keep this in mind going forward, we’re unable to make big changes to it at this time. What we are able to do is change the message from “Goodbye” to “Thank you.” This change will take effect this Sunday, February 17.”

“I understand that this does not resolve the issue of users not seeing the link in the top right hand corner that allows users to return to the detailed record screen. The fact that this link is not readily apparent has also been shown in our pilots for WorldCat Local. We are working towards a more integrated screen layout which should be available soon.”

Where does that leave us? Well… changing the “Goodbye” to “thank you” is a small step in the right direction, and it sounds like they have seen the larger problem and are working on a solution. So that’s good.

More importantly – they heard my complaint, contacted me, worked on a change, and responded back… coming from a huge organization like OCLC, that’s truly saying something! thanks, OCLC! It’s nice to know they listen to their community.